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Owning · Homeowner notesJames Yeo, CEA R051864Z · 25 October 2026 · 8 min read
Quick answer
On 19 October 2026 the High Court finished a four-year lawsuit between two brothers over a semi-detached house at Eng Kong Road that their mother left them in 2012. The house sold for $5 million in 2022. The brothers then spent years in court over who owed rent for living in it, who should get the tenant's rent, whether one brother could charge the other a commission for selling it, and whether a note promising $300,000 each to their two younger brothers, who were left out of the will, was binding. The judge said it was.
Every one of those fights came from something the will did not say. It left a house that was still being built to two sons jointly, with no instruction on who could live in it, what rent was owed, when it should be sold or what to do if the two could not agree, and it made those same two sons the executors. The $600,000 the court ordered paid is roughly what the family had privately agreed was fair as early as 2018. The will could have said so in 2012.
I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. I am a property agent, and what interests me in this case is the part a lawyer would call background: how an inherited house gets lived in, rented out and sold when the owners are siblings who do not agree. I have sold flats for families in that position, and the pattern in this judgment is one I recognise. The source is the published High Court judgment, Chan Yip Tong David v Chan Yip Tong Franklin [2026] SGHC 219, which is public and which anyone can read on the Singapore Courts website.
What happened
The mother signed her will on 25 October 2012 and died on 21 December 2012. She left four properties to four people: a semi-detached house at Eng Kong Road to her sons David and Franklin in equal shares, a second property to the same two sons and a granddaughter, and a condo to two granddaughters. Two other sons, George and Jack, both alive when the will was made, were not named at all. The judgment does not say why. David and Franklin were appointed executors.
The Eng Kong house had been bought in February 2012 while still under construction, so the estate was paying progress instalments on it for sixteen months after she died. It got its TOP in June 2014. Franklin's family moved in that October and stayed until late 2016. It then sat empty for about eight months, was rented to a tenant from August 2017 until early 2022, and was sold in April 2022. By then the brothers had owned it together for more than nine years.
In June 2018 an uncle flew in from Mauritius to try to settle things between the four brothers. His proposal: David and Franklin would each give $300,000 to George and Jack out of the house sale. Both agreed, verbally. Nothing was paid.
In September 2021 Franklin, who is a property agent, found a buyer at $5 million, more than 10% above the bank's $4.5 million valuation. At a meeting on 11 September to sign the Option to Purchase, David refused to sign unless Franklin first signed a handwritten note setting aside $600,000 of the proceeds for George and Jack. Franklin was angry, David walked out, Franklin called him back, both signed the note, and David signed the option. The next day Franklin messaged that he rejected the note and had signed "under duress". The sale completed anyway. The $600,000 went into a joint account that needed both brothers' signatures, and David would not sign it out to anyone except George and Jack.
Franklin had already sued David in 2022. The trial ran from October 2024 to August 2026 and the judgment came out on 19 October 2026.
What the court decided
| Dispute | Outcome |
|---|---|
| The $600,000 note for George and Jack | Binding. David agreeing to proceed with the sale was consideration. The duress argument failed: Franklin "should not be allowed to now raise the doctrine of economic duress to wriggle out of keeping to his word". The judge found it "obvious" that Franklin was "bent on making a killing from the sale". The money goes to the two younger brothers. |
| Rent for Franklin's family living in the house, Oct 2014 to Apr 2015 | Dismissed. The court found David had agreed to a rent-free period until another property was let. |
| Rent for Sep to Nov 2016 | Franklin to pay David $12,000. He could not prove he had paid September, and the obligation covered his family's stay, not only his own. |
| Tenant's rent, $142,971 sitting in a joint account | Split equally. Franklin's claim that David owed him "excess rent" of $74,880 was dismissed. |
| Franklin's $15,600 commission for letting the house | Dismissed. The tenancy agreement named the agency, not Franklin, as payee, and David never signed a commission agreement. |
| Franklin's defamation claim over David's email to the agency | Dismissed. David had written to PropNex's whistleblowing address saying he suspected the commission had never been submitted. It had not; the agency confirmed it on 22 April 2022. The email was true, so the defence of justification succeeded. |
| Property tax, renovation costs | Dismissed. |
Simplified from the judgment. There were more than a dozen heads of claim; these are the ones that matter to a homeowner.
What the will could have said
A will cannot stop siblings disliking each other. It can remove the things they end up fighting about. Reading this judgment, five gaps stand out. None is unusual. I see versions of them in families that never go to court, because the house sells before the argument gets that far.
1. It left two sons out and said nothing about why
That silence is where the whole case starts. The family spent ten years trying to put it right by themselves, through an uncle, a verbal agreement and finally a note signed in anger at an OTP signing, and the court was only asked to enforce the note, not to rewrite the will. A court will not add a beneficiary the testator left out. If the exclusion was deliberate, a short statement of reasons in the will or in a separate letter of wishes closes the question. If it was not, and the mother expected her two named sons to look after the other two, a fixed legacy of $300,000 each, paid from the sale of the house, would have done in 2012 what the High Court did in 2026.
2. It gave a house to two people with no rule for living in it
The biggest money in this case was not the $600,000. It was rent: whether Franklin's family owed anything for two years in the house, how much, and who kept the tenant's rent afterwards. The court had to reconstruct oral agreements from WhatsApp messages years later. The will could have said that any beneficiary who occupies the property pays the other a market rent, or that nobody occupies it and it is let, or that one son may live there rent-free for a fixed period. Any of those would have been better than silence.
3. It did not say when, or whether, to sell
Nine years is a long time for two people who do not get along to own a house together. A will can direct the executors to sell the property and divide the proceeds, which takes the "whether" out of it. It can give one beneficiary the right to buy the other out at an independent valuation within a set period. It can set a long-stop date after which the property must be put on the market. Here the sale only happened when one brother found a buyer at a price the other could not refuse, and the price became leverage for everything else.
4. It made the two beneficiaries the executors
An executor's job is to carry out the will, including selling assets and settling what the estate owes. When the two executors are also the two people whose interests collide, every decision needs both signatures and every signature becomes a bargaining chip, which is exactly what happened with the $600,000 and the $142,971 sitting in joint accounts for years. A third, neutral executor, or a professional one, would have cost the estate a fee and saved it four years of litigation.
5. It said nothing about who would sell it, or on what terms
One of the owners was a licensed agent. He let the house and later sold it, and charged, or tried to charge, his co-owner a commission that was never agreed in writing and, as it turned out, never submitted to his agency. That produced a commission claim, a defamation claim and an email to a whistleblowing address. This is the part I would most like homeowners to take from the case, so it gets its own section.
What I would do, as the agent
If you are a co-owner selling an inherited property: every owner signs the agency agreement and the commission agreement, before marketing starts, or the agent does not have a client. I will not take an inherited property on the instruction of one sibling with a promise that the others "are fine with it". Those are the files that stop at the option stage.
If one of the owners is an agent: he or she should not be the agent on that sale. Appoint someone with no share in the price. The same person cannot be the seller who wants the highest number and the salesperson who is supposed to advise on it, and this judgment shows what the other owners think of that arrangement when it goes wrong.
If the family has a side agreement: like the $300,000 each here, put it in writing before the property is marketed, not at the OTP signing. A buyer with a cheque does not care about your family's arrangements, and a promise extracted at the table is exactly the kind that ends up argued over for four years.
If any commission or rent is to pass between co-owners: a signed agreement and a receipt from the agency, every time. The defamation claim in this case failed because the commission really had not been submitted. The agent had no receipt to show.
What a will should say is a lawyer's job, and the five points above are the questions to ask one, not the answers. What I can tell you is what an unresolved will does to a sale: it slows it, it discounts it, and it hands every co-owner a veto they will eventually use.
Frequently asked questions
Can siblings be forced to sell an inherited property in Singapore?
Co-owners cannot be forced to sell by the other co-owners alone, but a court can order a sale of jointly owned property if one co-owner applies. It is slow and expensive. A will that directs the executors to sell, or gives one beneficiary a buy-out right at valuation, avoids the question.
Does a sibling who lives in an inherited house have to pay rent to the others?
Only if they agreed to, or a court decides they should account for it. In the Eng Kong Road case the court looked at years of messages to work out what the brothers had agreed. A will or a written co-owner agreement can set the rule in one line.
Can a will leave a child out?
Yes. For non-Muslim estates Singapore has no forced-heirship rule for adult children, and a court will not add a beneficiary the testator chose to leave out. The two excluded brothers in this case were paid only because their brothers signed a note, which the court then enforced as a contract.
Is a handwritten agreement signed at an OTP meeting binding?
In this case, yes. The court found that one brother's agreement to proceed with the sale was consideration for the other's promise, and that signing in anger, under commercial pressure, is not duress. Each case turns on its facts.
Can a co-owner who is a property agent charge the other co-owner commission?
Only with a commission agreement the paying co-owner has signed. The commission claim here failed because the tenancy agreement named the agency as payee and the co-owner never signed anything. The safer arrangement is for a co-owner who is an agent not to act on that sale at all.
Who should be the executor when a property is left to two children?
If the two are likely to disagree, an independent third executor or a professional executor. Two beneficiary-executors who do not agree can leave money in joint accounts for years, as happened here.
Disclaimer. This article is general commentary on a published court judgment and is provided for information only. It is not legal, financial or estate-planning advice, and nothing in it creates an adviser-client or agent-client relationship. The facts and quotations are taken from the publicly available judgment and from published reports of it, summarised and simplified; the judgment itself is the only authoritative account, and the people named in it are referred to solely as parties to that public case. James Yeo is a licensed real estate salesperson, not a lawyer, and makes no representation about the parties beyond what the court recorded. Laws and their interpretation change and every family's circumstances differ, so consult a qualified lawyer before making or changing a will, a co-ownership arrangement or any decision about an inherited property. To the fullest extent permitted by law, James Yeo and C & H Properties Pte Ltd accept no liability for any loss arising from reliance on this article. If you believe anything here is inaccurate, contact James Yeo and it will be reviewed and corrected.
Licensed real estate salesperson, CEA R051864Z. 91 homes sold across 22 towns, 78 of them HDB. Creator of the C.H.O.I.C.E. framework and author of Buy & Sell Properties Start With C.H.O.I.C.E. I sell for a fixed $1,999 plus GST instead of 2%, with no exclusive agreement to sign.
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